Beirut Arab news agency al Nashra reported on Saturday November 22, that [White House Muslim envoy] Dalia Mogahed has succeeded in canceling a meeting between the Maronite Patriarch of Lebanon and President Barack Obama. Writing in al Nashra, the reporter said “an unnamed US source told the news agency, that those who sought canceling a visit of (the spiritual head of the Maronite Church) Patriarch Beshara Rahi to the White House are Dalia Mujahid (Mogahed), the highest adviser on Arab and Islamic Affairs in the State Department, who is from Egyptian origins. And that,” according to al Nashra, “heeding a request by the higher leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, who consider that US Administration must support the Islamist Sunni current facing the Iranian current in the region.”

Darth Vader has been forced out. Thor has fallen under the hammer of political correctness.

Any sign of blood, gore or death is likely to be met with a groan at the school doors, where costumes deemed violent are headed for the crypt.

At least that's the fear of some kids and parents at two southeast elementary schools, as yet another fun childhood holiday is sent through the wringer of social sanitation, to emerge flat and boring.

"I don't want to pull Halloween away from the kids -- they are losing too many celebrations already," said Jackie Ford, mother to two children attending Ramsay elementary.

"I think this is a valid holiday and we need to celebrate it. It's a Canadian classic, scary and all."

And she's right, with Christmas now a non-religious winter break, Valentine's Day robbed of choice with cards shared out equally, and Easter's meaning eradicated altogether.

Occasions that once defined the Canadian experience have been watered down to the point of being sanitized, safe-for-all celebrations of not much at all.

The obscenity of obscuring or completely removing a holiday or custom by the ham-fisted left is met with the squishiness of the perpetually timid. Black and Orange Day is a farce spawned by the milquetoasts who fear those who cannot pick a real religion. Now we have the hovercraft of cultural events.

The guise of protection against the potentially harmful is as deceptive as any mask. It sounds, on its face, as reasonable but it is not. It's a polite paranoia, something unacceptable in the face of reason. At what point are those of age expected to grow up? Hand over expensive cell phones that are no more than toys but refrain from wearing a Frankenstein costume?

Halloween is a day set aside for the freaky and strange, for the chilling of the blood, and for the fun of children, whose years of innocence are short and subject to the encroachment of the whims of the impatient. Where is the amusement in whimpering and cowering away from rubber masks, props and fun-sized confections? It's bad enough that Baby Jesus no longer merits a day of His own but now Halloween, too, must join Him in the dustbin of wrongfully discarded holidays and customs.